I've been thinking about porches a lot this week. One reason for this is because ours is tiny, inadequate, almost unusable as a social space in part because part the house's original porch has been co-opted as entirely needed mudroom space (when we built this space, I had this grand delusion that we would be able to use it as a nice hybrid indoor/outdoor space). I'd conveniently forgotten that six children each need to have 14 pairs of shoes. 84 shoes don't leave much space for front yard levees. But I digress.). The conclusion of our own recent porch discussion was that we can't afford a new porch, so we're lucky that we have friendly neighbours with a beautiful porch and we'll just have to share with them or, if they don't feel like having us all loll on their comfy furniture then we'll have to encourage them to go on vacation a lot (they're really nice neighbours so I suspect this will all somehow work out).
As these things seem to go, as soon as you start thinking about something, the whole world suddenly seems to rotate around it. So on Friday night, while visiting a more distant neighbour with a beautiful set of Victorian porches, upper and lower, we were talking about how her porches were crumbling and becoming unsafe. The bill for repair would be almost as high as building a new modest little house, so they're in a holding pattern right now. But she told me something about her porches that I'd never thought about before. The lower porch, she said, was a great place to sit to participate in the social life of the street. People walking by would notice you, wander up and chat, perhaps even sit with you. The upper porch was more private and intimate. It was a great place to sit and observe the life of the street while at the same time being a bit more inaccessible -- announcing with that bit of extra distance and elevation that your eyes were on the street but your soul was feeling a bit more private. Multiple porches as a way of spatially regulating your on-the-street social life. Very clever.
Yesterday I was reading
Avi Friedman's fantastic little book
Room for Thought. This is a collection of marvellous essays about domestic spaces and influences of the city plan on social life, among other things. In one essay he bemoaned the absence of porch life in certain kinds of homes and neighbourhoods, and he argued that our electronic lives have taken the place of our porches. I'm not sure I agree completely with that statement, but it does make it interesting to reflect on different types of social networking tools and upper and lower porches. In Facebook, for example, unless you take the time to tweak settings a little bit, the default is a lower porch. Anyone you've previously befriended can wander up, take a look, and see via a little green dot whether you're on the porch. If you are, they can not only peek in your windows but they can ping you with a bit of chat. A Twitter account seems to me a bit more like an upper porch. Except by prior habits of use and a bit of guesswork, nobody can really tell when you're on the porch looking out. You can sit and watch the passing parade or, if you're so inclined, you can lean over the porch and holler out. In face-to-face social life, we use a rich palette of body-based cues to signal our availability and focus of attention. In electronic social networking, the rules are very different. Our presence, though I'd argue no less real, is ephemeral and very highly mediated.
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